


far from the home I knew

by Missy



Category: Into the Woods (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bisexuality, Crossdressing, Fix-It, Gen, Running Away, Secret Identity, Travel, Yuletide Madness 2015, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 05:57:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5528618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The giantess offers the Baker's Wife the perfect excuse to escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	far from the home I knew

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kol/gifts).



The giant wife’s very giant heel misses her by inches. Scant, small, short inches. 

She stands gaping at the hole it left behind, and at the tiny distance between her body and the sheer cliff two inches to the right of it.

Very still, she stands on the precipice. The giant’s wife hesitates for a moment. She swears she sees a smile cross the creature’s face before she turns and stomps back into the thicket.

She rushes toward the vacated spot – she wants to warn them, needs to protect her son – but something makes her stop. She realizes, suddenly, that she’s been here for hours alone, and that her husband hasn’t come round the bend crying her name (neither has the prince – but what more can one expect from princes?). She is for all intensive purposes dead to all of them.

And if they think she’s dead…well, then she can be anything she wants to be, can’t she?

 

*** 

 

Outside of the limits of the forest, four inches from the town’s border, she dyes her hair pitch black and cuts it into a bob. It’s easier to pass as a man, it seems; to get anywhere in the world when you bear the false confidence the world attaches to manhood. 

She fashions a bow and a string and learns to shoot for food, her own sustenance. She misses more often than not, until hunger shapes her into a hunter. 

 

*** 

 

She learns how to walk long distances in the fresh air without worrying about her pale skin or her aching feet, and how to get from one town to another without asking too many questions. Every village in the kingdom seemed to have a problem that was in need of solution, and a hunter was often as good as a prince in a pinch. She slowly adapts to life as a scavenger, born to salvage and save what she can and must through her hands and her wits. 

There’s a princess now and then, of course, willing and eager – and a prince, trembling and grateful, but she doesn’t linger on their faces. The activity, the feeling of total strength and mastery of her situation, trumps all. 

 

*** 

 

When they give her gold she remembers Jack and his wild stories and smiles. Maybe her husband’s found the goose and they’re all together in safety, baking away their days, raising the children. She’s heard that Jack’s mother died, that Red’s grandmother is gone. She can’t imagine that her husband would allow orphans to leave his sight unfostered. That, she knows, is the sort of man he is.

And part of her loves him, even though she can't live with him when her life is so incomplete. Those years feel like a halcyon fever dream to her, a period of magic where a sweet-smelling peach of a babe nuzzled at her nipple and a man’s eyes glowed bright when he called her dear. And when she sees mothers with a child she must tuck her three-cornered hat lower and rush away, off to the next adventure.

 

**** 

 

She hears in a crowded tavern about the truth, their fate. That the bakery still stands and that her son is growing tall and strong. That Red and Jack are living with the Baker and are indeed happily thriving under her husband’s care. That he houses the princess in the bakery, too, and that she works to care for the children and the bakery beside him. It is quite a scandal, but in the wake of the collapse of the monarchy there is no need to persuade Cinderella to return to a marriage which had already been abandoned by her husband, so the partnership has not been questioned much. That together all of them had battled an evil man called Rumpelstiltskin who had made a deal with Cinderella to provide anything she desired if she so chose to spin gold for him; gold couldn’t be spun, of course, so naturally they had been forced to outwit him so the baby wouldn’t be sent off to be his apprentice. 

Gently prying the wench from her neck, she turns toward the traveler to probe his explanation. “But how did they trick the man?” She knows her husband is steadfast if not particularly able to see beyond his emotional scars. 

“They guessed his name. Had him write it on a slip of paper.”

A tiny thrill races through her. It passes.

“Then he’s much more clever than any give him credit for,” says the former wife of the Baker, who pays for her meal and disappeared into the ink of the night, and then off to far greater things.

**Author's Note:**

> And then there were many more princes - but only now and again. Happy Yuletide!


End file.
